§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Muddled-head Evolutionary “Thinking”

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My friend Heidi Hoff Wurst emailed the following article (the source is unknown to me).

“Cell Phone Radiation May Speed Human Evolution

“A new study by European Union (EU) researchers shows that the electromagnetic radiation from cellular phones can cause DNA mutations that reproduce, “opening the door to new vistas in human evolution,” according to a spokesman for the cell phone industry.

“A lot of the news you’ll hear in the coming days will dwell on the potential for health damage, tumors and the like,” said the unnamed industry source. “But if Darwin was right, mutations are good for our species. The faster our cells mutate the faster we’ll evolve and fulfill the dreams of generations of evolutionary biologists.”

“The spokesman acknowledged that during the initial waves of mutation the natural selection process “could get messy,” but he insisted that “most mutations would be beneficial—potentially yielding larger brains, additional ears (‘Can you hear me now?’) or even an extra appendage for holding a cell phone while driving.”

” “Thanks to cell phones, you can accomplish everything more quickly,” said the source. “We’ve taken Darwinian evolution from the realm of wishful thinking for atheists, to something that may produce results in a generation or less. We’ve just turbo-charged the time factor and reduced the element of chance making evolution faster and more reliable.”

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One line from the article says it all: “But if Darwin was right, mutations are good for our species. The faster our cells mutate the faster we’ll evolve and fulfill the dreams of generations of evolutionary biologists.”

This ludicrous statement typifies the muddle-headed contradictions that pass for science in today’s educational system. Teachers unions and national-state planners are so intently focused upon teaching Darwinian evolutionary dogma as a cornerstone of socialist collectivism and moral relativity that they don’t even notice that they are talking out of both sides of their mouths (or, if you prefer, speaking with forked tongues).

First, the most basic purpose of Darwin’s hypothesis was to deny the existence of God by attempting to prove that every life form is the result of random chance, that there is no intelligent design to any of the life forms on earth. If that can be “scientifically” established, said Darwin and his supporters like Thomas Huxley, then there is no such thing as morality, no such thing as sin. Instead, there is nothing more than the struggle for survival.

Darwinian “scientists” are at pains to tell us that, contrary to Biblical doctrine and moral philosophy, there was no purpose to life. It just happened. There is, therefore, clearly no such thing as higher or lower forms of life, nor is there any “evolutionary dream” to be fulfilled. Things are no more than what they happen, at the moment, to be.

There is nothing to say that evolution will not wipe out all the presumably “accumulated” physical and mental characteristics of humans. Random genetic mutations theoretically could produce almost anything. All that Darwin said is that whatever random genetic material at a given time equips its possessors to survive in greater numbers will cause that genetic material to tend toward dominance.

It’s just as easy to envision a brutish, immensely strong, leathery-skinned creature of limited intelligence wiping out humans as to imagine that humans will evolve to some higher and better form (remember that there is no good or bad, better or worse, in Darwin’s scheme; just physical survivability).

How then to square that with the putatively scientific statement: “But if Darwin was right, mutations are good for our species. The faster our cells mutate the faster we’ll evolve and fulfill the dreams of generations of evolutionary biologists”?

Packing this sort of nonsense into the heads of inexperienced students, one may suppose, is what liberals mean when they protest that they want children to learn to think, not to absorb specific information about academic subjects.

The most important thing to notice, however, is the real point of such double-talk: its unstated subtext that intellectual state-planners can structure society in ways that will shape humans into the types ideally suited for the earthly “perfection” of communal, socialistic living. That is the real dream of evolutionary biologists.

Cell phones might just turn out to be one of their secret weapons in creating the Brave New World.